Professor Ezekiel Harkinson's Plan

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

- George Orwell

Alas for the best-laid plans of our brightest intellectuals that they should always suffer defeat at the hands of the ignorant. How far humanity might progress if we were not held back by pithy emotional considerations like people marrying who they want to marry!

Enter Professor Ezekiel Harkinson, who has lit upon a general plan for the betterment of humanity. Namely, eugenics. Charles Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton coined the term itself, and became a proponent of the modern, "scientific" eugenics that became a cause célèbre of 19th century progressives. It might seem a strange, even morbid, compulsion to associate doctrines of selective breeding, genetic screening, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, marriage restrictions, miscegenation laws, and ultimately genocide with progressivism, yet it make sense when considering that the dominating feature of progressive thought and politics is the belief that humanity is morally perfectible through external authoritarian control. With enough restrictions, humanity may achieve a state of grace, justice, equality, security, or whatever the goal may be. So academia, politicians, media, suffragettes, temperance activists, progressive churches, and any thinking intellectual of good conscience saw the potential to eliminate poverty and violence through the breeding out of human "degeneracy." Organizations like the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood) advocated for and implemented the ideas. The result was state-run forced sterilization programs for physical, mental, and moral "defectives" across the Westernized nations, culminating in the Holocaust. It was largely conservatives who opposed eugenics, like G.K. Chesterton with his 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils and Pope Pius XI's encyclical Casti connubii.    

Lieutenant Henry H. Barkoll, US Navy, offers a more lighthearted and farcical critique of eugenics' shortcomings in his short story Professor Ezekiel Harkinson's Plan. It appears here as it did originally in  the March 1891 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.

The Ghost-Extinguisher by Gelett Burgess

The following tale of ghost-extinguishing may seem somewhat familiar. It appears that Gelett Burgess figured out the business of removing unwanted spectres long before Mickey Mouse or Dan Akroyd. 

The Ghost-Extinguisher appears here as it did in the April, 1905 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine by E.J. Rath

Pity the frustrated inventor, who has a remarkable idea that must be shaped to sheer dumb fact. Such is Mr. Penney, latest in the line of Darius Green and other hayseed inventors. Formerly of the city, forced to the countryside for his health, Mr. Penney cannot acclimatize to the condition of being a farmer. His workshop lures him ever onward to misadventure, undaunted by his numerous setbacks.

Written by E.J. Rath, pseudonym of Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd, Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine appears here as it originally did in the August 1908 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Brainerd was a well-established author, many of whose stories had been adapted to film. Tragically, she died at the age of 37 when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington D.C. collapsed under heavy snow on January 27, 1922. The incident also claimed the life her husband Chauncey and 200 others. Illustrations for Mr. Penney's Aerial Submarine are by Horace Taylor. Click on each image for a larger version. 

Announcing "Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties: An Anthology - 1890-1910"

 The latest in my series of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances has been released!

To the generation that came of age during the horrors of the World Wars, the Turn of the Century took on a nostalgic life of its own. 

Strolling ladies with bustles, parasols, and feathered hats. Men in dapper suits, straw boaters, and handlebar moustaches. Barbershop quartets singing “Sweet Adeline” and “In the Good Old Summertime.” Penny-farthing bicycles weaving between horse-drawn trolleys and newfangled horseless carriages. Thomas Edison’s latest invention. The town marching band playing in the park bandstand. Colourful Queen Anne homes accented with gingerbread trim. Gibson Girls staring indolently from the pages of Life and Harper’s. Casey at the bat. Ice wagons and ice boxes and ice cream parlours. Dime novels and dime stores. Vaudeville shows. Ragtime music. Silent movies. Party-line telephones. Suffragettes in green and purple sashes. Old fashioned rowboat dates. Gaslit evenings on Main Street. These happy days of youth before The Great War, The Spanish Flu, The Roaring Twenties, and The Great Depression were the “Gay Nineties.”

The real 1890’s and 1900’s were an era of change and a cornucopia of invention, which lead inevitably to fictional tales of scientific discovery and technological progress in the popular magazines of the era. This volume reprints the lost science fiction of Pearson’s, The Century, The Black Cat, and Cosmopolitan, featuring over a dozen tales by such celebrated authors as Mark Twain, Ellis Parker Butler, Herbert Quick, and George Chetwyn Griffith.

To order Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties: An Anthology - 1890-1910, visit Amazon or click on the image above. If you can also share this post or the link on your social networks, leave a review on Amazon, and rate Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties, that would go a long way to helping spread the word!

Thank you very much for you support of this blog for all these years and for your purchase of my new anthology.

Geoffrey's Planklaggephone by Ellis Parker Butler

Ellis Parker Butler, the eminent American humourist and author of Pigs is Pigs and An Experiment in Gyro-Hats, strikes again in this story of invention gone awry published in the September 1909 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine. It is presented here as it was originally published, with illustrations by Horace Taylor. Click on the image for a larger version.

And a note on dialect: the character Casey is supposed to be Irish.  

The Future of the Earth, According to Cosmo

The Future of the Earth by Nobel Prize-winning Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was originally published in the March 1918 volume of Cosmopolitan. As futurism, it is not very specific with technological, social, or evolutionary hypotheses. But in the context of the Great War raging on around it, it is a marvelous sermon. "It is well, sometimes," he says towards the end of his article, "to tell ourselves, especially in these days of distress and discouragement, that we are living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end." It is advice still worth heeding. 

Accompanying the article is a magnificent illustration titled The Earth with the Milky Way and Moon by Wladyslaw T. Benda.